Mostly a brilliant exposition of how complex social and political problems
get solved — or, if not exactly solved, then dealt with —
by decentralized processes of partisan mutual adjustment, and how this
is actually superior to what could be achieved by centralized authority. (This
draws on, and extends, his earlier
book A Strategy of
Decision, and foreshadows much
of Usable
Knowledge.) It is however marred by some concluding chapters of a
complacency which I feel could only have come from an American liberal —
a white American liberal — circa 1965. Lindblom's later works
suggest his wish to revise and extend his remarks on the inherent benevolence
of decision-making by partisan mutual adjustment... It deserves a full review,
indeed Lindblom's whole output does, but there's no time.

Essays on cognitive psychology and psychologists and related topics, by the
author of the
great Eye
and Brain. The collection came out in 1986, which leads to some
oddness, e.g., when talking about neural models and information theory.

Decent and reliable on what it does cover, but to my eyes rather
old-fashioned in its choice of topics (e.g., nothing on non-parametrics). I
read the first edition, of 2001; I haven't looked at the second.

More relics from graduate school, revisited as part of the book purge.
These books are now 15--20 years old; I'm sure that there're more up-to-date
treatments of both topics, though I feel like I'd know if something had
displaced Chaikin and Lubensky form its niche, and I don't.

Blanchard and Fischer is about "modern" macro, models based on agents who
know what the economy is like optimizing over time, possible under some limits.
This is the DSGE style of macro. which
has lately come into so much discredit — thoroughly deserved
discredit. Chaikin and Lubensky is about modern condensed matter physics,
especially soft condensed matter, based
on principles
of symmetry-breaking and phase transitions. Both books are about building
stylized theoretical models and solving them to see what they imply; implicitly
they are also about the considerations which go into building models in their
respective domains.

What is very striking, looking at them side by side, is that while these
are both books about mathematical modeling, Chaikin and Lubensky presents
empirical data, compares theoretical predictions to experimental results, and
goes into some detail into the considerations which lead to this sort
of model for nematic liquid crystals, or that model for magnetism.
There is absolutely nothing like this in Blanchard and Fischer — no data
at all, no comparison of models to reality, no evidence of any kind supporting
any of the models. There is not even an attempt, that I can find, to assess
different macroeconomic models, by comparing their
qualitative predictions to each other and to historical reality. I
presume that Blanchard and Fischer, as individual scholars, are not quite so
indifferent to reality, but their pedagogy is.